1961 Topps Stamps (Revisited)

In late October I posted my 1961 Topps Sticker Album, You can check it out at this link. I've been chipping away at these for a while. I hate the fact that I have to pay over a buck for some of them. Even a dollar seems high but whatcha gonna do?

I'm not bringing this up again to show off new stamps but rather to add some info to what I had previously written. It turns out that not all teams were created equal in the Topps Stamp world in 1961. I was wrong in that previous post when I noted that each team had twelve stamps issued. That is the case in the NL...8 teams, 12 stamps per team to fill ten album slots. So there were 96 NL stamps to fill the 80 spots on the NL pages.

But the Junior Circuit, with two clubs debuting in '61, gummed up the works. Over there 5 clubs got 12 player stamps...the Red Sox, White Sox, Tigers, Indians and the Twins who had just slid in from Washington. My Orioles got 11 stamps. More on that in a bit. The Yankees (no surprise) and the Athletics (big surprise!) had 13 stamps each. The two expansion clubs, the Angels and Senators (who replaced the departed for Minnesota version) got 7 stamps each. That's 111 stamps (or 112 if you count Al Kaline twice as he got a stamp in both colors).

The other aspect of the stamps that I hadn't given much thought to was the color. Obviously, there were brown and green stamps and it's easy to see that the league designation had nothing to do with which player was done in which color.

           But the two colors actually give us the notion that there were two 'series' of these. The Twins stamps can be used to show this. The green Twins have the team listed as Minn.-St Paul. The Twins with brown stamps carry the whole new name, Minnesota Twins. According to Wikipedia, the Twins' name was announced late in November of 1960. Too soon for the first series of stamps to carry it.

The 'green early/brown late' also tells us why the Orioles got jobbed by having only 11 and the perennial doormat and unofficial Yankee farm club Athletics had 13. In January of 1961, those two clubs pulled off an eight-player trade. Whitey Herzog, already a green A's stamp guy, went as part of the deal to the Orioles. Heading the other way was outfielder Bob Boyd who appears on a brown stamp as an Athletic. It would make sense that the deal was too late for Topps to change Herzog's stamp but they were able to show Boyd as a member of the A's. Boyd was supposed to be the Orioles 12th stamp.

Here they are in my album with future A's manager (and twice-an-Oriole) Dick Williams in between.

I figure the Yankees got an extra stamp because there was a slot to fill to complete the printing sheet and they are, after all, the Yankees.

I've 'completed' three team pages. And others are getting close. Below are a few of them. I have a brown Kaline stamp. Likely he replaced a player scheduled for the later series but was removed and so he has stamps in both colors.

The Athletics' page is full, all 10 slots covered. I actually have 11 different A's players but Bud Daley came too late to make the album. I haven't decided what to do with the 'latecomers'. I don't want to squeeze them onto the team pages. I may do what I figure I would have done as a kid, stick them on the inside front cover pages where there is some open area. We'll see.

The Braves were the first team to have a full complement of 10 stamps. I have Henry Aaron, Spahnie and Ed Mathews on the page. I would have held open a slot for any of those three had I needed to.

Over on the right side of the blog, I have added a page link for my 1961 Stamp build. Much of the info I typed here can be found there along with a checklist/needs list and more. I will not link to the Oldcardboard.com site which characterized these as 'bland' and praised to 1962 stamp set. That one was full of murky, out-of-focus pictures. Not even the fun team logo stamps that were included could make it as sweet as the 1961 bunch. Some folks just don't appreciate classic beauty.

Homework

Lots of stuff on my plate at the moment. Weekends have been crazy. But I wanted to take time out to post a couple of neat vintage football cards that I grabbed as "COMC order rounder-outers" a couple of weeks ago (You've done that, right? Added some stuff you were not looking for to justify the $3 shipping. Sure you have).

That's Football Hall of Famer 'Deacon Jones on his 1967 Philly Gum card. You'll see him referred to as 'David' from time to time. But 'Dave'? That's pretty weird to me. But as Dave, David or Deacon he was about as great a defensive lineman as you could ever hope to see. He was part of the Rams' Fearsome Foursome which consisted of Rosey Grier, Lamar Lundy, Merlin Olsen and Jones. They terrorized NFL quarterbacks through the early to mid 60s.

This isn't Philly Gum's most inspired design.

The 1966 Philly Gum Bob Boyd. Here is another guy who I knew as one name but almost always is referred to by another. I always called him Bobby Boyd. 

No matter, he was a standout DB for some great 1960s Baltimore Colts clubs. I used to have a black and white Polaroid picture of Boyd that I took at Colts training camp many years ago. This picture is better, as is the '66 Philly Gum design. This set always tempts me as one I'd like to chase. 

Topps Stamps from 1961 and 1962

  

The Topps Stamps were my favorite 'insert during my youthful collecting days. But nobody used that term in 1961. It was just 'things Topps put in packs'. Every time I see a '61 stamp like the Bob Boyd I associate it with riding home on the New Jersey Transit #13 Broad and getting off a block early to get a pack of cards. I liked the cards, but I was a couple of years from being a set collector and the stamps were my motivation for buying packs of the series they were included with.

The '61 stamps were much cooler than the '62s, at least to me. They were done in tones of green or brown and the '62s were in color but that was irrelevant. The scrolling design, the portrait designed to look like a real old timey postage stamp, that was the thing.

I posted the '59 Bob Boyd card on my other blog earlier this year but today I learned something new about him. He was the first African-American player to play alongside white player on any Houston sports team. It was 1954 and Boyd joined the Houston Buffs, a Cardinal farm club. He faced the struggles you'd expect in a southern city in that era. There is an interesting article right here about Boyd and the Buffs.

As I look at the '61 Boyd and the '62 panels below I think I know why I preferred the '61s. They were not chopped and cropped pics stuck on a colored background. Topps was so sloppy at that sort of thing.  Check out the Moon/Brooks Robinson panel as an example. The portraits on the '61s showed the player and the ballpark background generally. Much better.